Jump to content
  • Sign Up

If current raids are too difficult for you, you are not the target demographic of raiding content


yusayu.3629

Recommended Posts

@yusayu.3629 said:Change my mind.

Not going to get into this any further beyond this post, as it's been discussed to death, and is unlikely to change given their inclusion of Strikes in the upcoming living story season.

@"Crystal Reid.2481" said:New forum, so I'll jump in with a new post on this.

We won't be adding a different difficulty tier at this time. Raids need to continue to remain the most challenging content in the game, and they aren't designed to be accessible by everyone from a skill perspective. Could they be more accessible from a "finding 9 other players to play with" side? Sure. That isn't always an easy problem to solve, and any solution would detract away from the team making more raid content. We'd love to get more content out to you guys faster really.

I see a lot of comments about W4 difficulty, so I'll add some notes on that as well. Balance came in later than expected since we had far more bosses and content to test than usual. Are we totally happy with how balance turned out? Yes and no. The Mursaat Overseer base difficulty is too easy, but we were very happy with the CM difficulty. For the next release we'd like to get difficulty tuned more back in line with Spirit Vale. However, some of that original difficulty and magic is hard to re-capture. You never forget your first raid boss kill.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/113984/#Comment_113984

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@yusayu.3629 said:Change my mind.

Not going to get into this any further beyond this post, as it's been discussed to death, and is unlikely to change given their inclusion of Strikes in the upcoming living story season.

@"Crystal Reid.2481" said:New forum, so I'll jump in with a new post on this.

We won't be adding a different difficulty tier at this time.
Raids need to continue to remain the most challenging content in the game, and they aren't designed to be accessible by everyone from a skill perspective
. Could they be more accessible from a "finding 9 other players to play with" side? Sure. That isn't always an easy problem to solve, and any solution would detract away from the team making more raid content. We'd love to get more content out to you guys faster really.

I see a lot of comments about W4 difficulty, so I'll add some notes on that as well. Balance came in later than expected since we had far more bosses and content to test than usual. Are we totally happy with how balance turned out? Yes and no. The Mursaat Overseer base difficulty is too easy, but we were very happy with the CM difficulty. For the next release we'd like to get difficulty tuned more back in line with Spirit Vale. However, some of that original difficulty and magic is hard to re-capture. You never forget your first raid boss kill.

Recent interview with Mike Z:

Is there room for a ‘story’ difficulty in raids and other high-end content?

MZ: There is. There’s a constant, constant tug. Do we go build new raids for the raid group, or do we pull somebody to go make the old raids easier? The Bastion of the Penitent is one that we get a lot of comments on, because it’s the Saul D’Alessio story and the mursaat. It’s a very powerful, moving story, and it was very self-contained to that raid. So unless you’re a raider, you never see it.

I would not rule it out. The thing that we need to be careful about is how we manage that expectation. Because if we go back and release ‘story mode’ for an individual raid, that is taking time away from other things like being able to build additional raid content for the raiders. We want to make sure that we’re trying to service both groups.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Tyson.5160 said:

@yusayu.3629 said:Change my mind.

Not going to get into this any further beyond this post, as it's been discussed to death, and is unlikely to change given their inclusion of Strikes in the upcoming living story season.

@"Crystal Reid.2481" said:New forum, so I'll jump in with a new post on this.

We won't be adding a different difficulty tier at this time.
Raids need to continue to remain the most challenging content in the game, and they aren't designed to be accessible by everyone from a skill perspective
. Could they be more accessible from a "finding 9 other players to play with" side? Sure. That isn't always an easy problem to solve, and any solution would detract away from the team making more raid content. We'd love to get more content out to you guys faster really.

I see a lot of comments about W4 difficulty, so I'll add some notes on that as well. Balance came in later than expected since we had far more bosses and content to test than usual. Are we totally happy with how balance turned out? Yes and no. The Mursaat Overseer base difficulty is too easy, but we were very happy with the CM difficulty. For the next release we'd like to get difficulty tuned more back in line with Spirit Vale. However, some of that original difficulty and magic is hard to re-capture. You never forget your first raid boss kill.

Recent interview with Mike Z:

Is there room for a ‘story’ difficulty in raids and other high-end content?

MZ: There is. There’s a constant, constant tug. Do we go build new raids for the raid group, or do we pull somebody to go make the old raids easier? The Bastion of the Penitent is one that we get a lot of comments on, because it’s the Saul D’Alessio story and the mursaat. It’s a very powerful, moving story, and it was very self-contained to that raid. So unless you’re a raider, you never see it.

I would not rule it out. The thing that we need to be careful about is how we manage that expectation. Because if we go back and release ‘story mode’ for an individual raid, that is taking time away from other things like being able to build additional raid content for the raiders. We want to make sure that we’re trying to service both groups.

Except story mode probably will be nothing like the raid and it won't have any of the rewards; the latter of which players demanding an easy mode still want.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think the take away from today's Mike Z interview is pretty definitive. Tiered difficulty levels are something they are most definitely considering - albeit with a close eye on resources and achieving a balance between the hardcore and access to a story mode. His comments about the Bastion of the Penitent storyline are pretty straightforward.

Do I expect to see this anytime soon? Of course not. But it is good to see that they are attempting to look at this issue from multiple perspectives - and that is the right thing to do. Raids as they are now are not sustainable in any way - they are too easy for "real" raiders and too hard for more casual story-oriented players. It's time to stop fighting against a split (tiered levels) and look for ways to make raids even harder while, on the other side, offering a way to simply experience the content (including the fights) for those who don't necessarily want to play the build/meta game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Your mind is of no consequence to this, the developer's opinion is what's going to stick, and they have plenty of playtime data rather than forum feedback to refer to. Someone already linked both Reid's (old post) and Mike's much more recent interview about this, and they seem to actually have a larger demographic under their radar, of which Strike Missions might not be the final solution but rather a step towards changing raids in themselves. Either way there is no way for us to predict this and target demographics can and do change overtime. You're not being very good at advertising a brand if you think you can explicitly choose a target demographic and have a constant number of followers instead of adapting your own brand to whoever wants to try it out (and do this while not alienating the people who are already hooked up, which is why this is so much more difficult than most posts here make it out to be).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Blaeys.3102" said:I think the take away from today's Mike Z interview is pretty definitive. Tiered difficulty levels are something they are most definitely considering - albeit with a close eye on resources and achieving a balance between the hardcore and access to a story mode. His comments about the Bastion of the Penitent storyline are pretty straightforward.

Do I expect to see this anytime soon? Of course not. But it is good to see that they are attempting to look at this issue from multiple perspectives - and that is the right thing to do. Raids as they are now are not sustainable in any way - they are too easy for "real" raiders and too hard for more casual story-oriented players. It's time to stop fighting against a split (tiered levels) and look for ways to make raids even harder while, on the other side, offering a way to simply experience the content (including the fights) for those who don't necessarily want to play the build/meta game.

If that is the take away you are having from the answer, you are very very optimistic. I'm reading into that: we don't have the resources, we will try not to lock story behind raid content, past raid content will probably never see any change in difficulty.

He is literally saying that they would rather create new content than revisit old content. Yes, future content, in this case strikes, might scale (think dragon bash), but raids will not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@"Blaeys.3102" said:I think the take away from today's Mike Z interview is pretty definitive. Tiered difficulty levels are something they are most definitely considering - albeit with a close eye on resources and achieving a balance between the hardcore and access to a story mode. His comments about the Bastion of the Penitent storyline are pretty straightforward.

Do I expect to see this anytime soon? Of course not. But it is good to see that they are attempting to look at this issue from multiple perspectives - and that is the right thing to do. Raids as they are now are not sustainable in any way - they are too easy for "real" raiders and too hard for more casual story-oriented players. It's time to stop fighting against a split (tiered levels) and look for ways to make raids even harder while, on the other side, offering a way to simply experience the content (including the fights) for those who don't necessarily want to play the build/meta game.

If that is the take away you are having from the answer, you are very very optimistic. I'm reading into that: we don't have the resources, we will try not to lock story behind raid content, past raid content will probably never see any change in difficulty.

He is literally saying that they would rather create new content than revisit old content. Yes, future content, in this case strikes, might scale (think dragon bash), but raids will not.

That's what I also read from this interview tbh.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would not rule it out. The thing that we need to be careful about is how we manage that expectation. Because if we go back and release ‘story mode’ for an individual raid, that is taking time away from other things like being able to build additional raid content for the raiders. We want to make sure that we’re trying to service both groups.

Very simple solution: let the living world team(s) create Raids from now on. Then the Raid team can expand on the already finished easy Raids and make much more interesting/exciting modes for them. There is already a lack of Raids, reducing their release pace even further would be the same as removing the content from the game completely. That way both groups get what they want.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Strike missions are intended to get everyone into raiding. Raiding is becoming the new endgame goal and content as both fractals and strikes will be used to push people toward raids. Basically what I gathered off of the article that came out last night is they want EVERYONE to get into raiding which either means they will be making easier raids going forward in more bulk. OR they will make a huge difficulty spike in upcoming content similar to HoT to push people toward specific builds, this could go along with class traitline reworks and class skill changes. (I think they are going to equalize everything to the same power scale as PoF, so you can run at least flavor wise what you like. But it will all be kind of marginalized acrossed the board. Or homogenized.)

https://www.pcgamesn.com/guild-wars-2/pvp-raids-world-restructuring

The article goes into more detail, they speak a lot about it and going forward it seems to me that the content for end game is going to be this.

  1. PvP==> specifically conquest, with off seasons.
  2. WvW with the restructure coming, and perhaps new maps for rotations? Who knows anymore.
  3. Fractals/strikes====> Raid training
  4. Raids with much more of a cadence.
  5. Harder open-world content===> Reworks of core maps for more cohesive difficulty scale with all the bells and whistles. Pushing people to learn the game in its entirety to make it so there is not such a disparity between the "Casuals" and the "elitists".

So to me it sounds like the WoW treatment, where like in retail WoW it holds your hand through the earlier content a lot more and uses content in open world/dungeons to teach you mechanics. And you're expected to know your class, role and how your playstyle works and what skills do and cc bars are so there won't be anymore of people going "What is dat!?!?!".

So streamlined guild wars 2 is on the way with everyone being pushed into playing like the min-maxing raiders. (Insert tony stark eye-roll here.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Thornwolf.9721" said:OR they will make a huge difficulty spike in upcoming content similar to HoT to push people toward specific builds

Reworks of core maps for more cohesive difficulty scale with all the bells and whistles.Impairing build variety is not good, in Open World it's worse than for fotm or raids.If even open world PvE demands builds that people do not have fun with, more people will leave the game.

make it so there is not such a disparity between the "Casuals" and the "elitists".If casuals are gone, there will be no disparity anyway.

If Arenanet wants to make harder content, they should restrict it to instanced content that is not part of the "main story".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Fueki.4753 said:

@"Thornwolf.9721" said:OR they will make a huge difficulty spike in upcoming content similar to HoT to push people toward specific builds

Reworks of core maps for more cohesive difficulty scale with all the bells and whistles.Impairing build variety is not good, in Open World it's worse than for fotm or raids.If even open world PvE demands builds that people do not have fun with, more people will leave the game.

make it so there is not such a disparity between the "Casuals" and the "elitists".If casuals are gone, there will be no disparity anyway.

If Arenanet wants to make harder content, they should restrict it to instanced content that is not part of the "main story".

I just find it hard to believe people argue against scaling difficulty in a video game.You're seriously saying that by level 80 you shouldnt have to have a decent build for open world?that you shouldnt have to swap a trait or weapon or two around occasionally?This is why we can't have nice things.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"mindcircus.1506" said:I just find it hard to believe people argue against scaling difficulty in a video game.You're seriously saying that by level 80 you shouldnt have to have a decent build for open world?that you shouldnt have to swap a trait or weapon or two around occasionally?

What if people simply do not enjoy Meta builds, but have fun with inferior builds?Why shouldn't these people at least be able to enjoy Open World?

For example, the build I currently enjoy most is Fire/air/Tempest ele with daggers.This isn't even close to being meta.If Arenanet pushes Open PvE so far that people can't play the builds they enjoy, do you think they stay in the game and use builds that are no fun to them?

This is why we can't have nice things.You already have high tier fractals and raids.Soon, you will have Strike Missions.You already have several "main story" bosses that can floor sub-optimal builds, including Balthazar and Mordremoth.

And you want to raise open world difficulty?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Fueki.4753 said:

@"mindcircus.1506" said:I just find it hard to believe people argue against scaling difficulty in a video game.You're seriously saying that by level 80 you shouldnt have to have a decent build for open world?that you shouldnt have to swap a trait or weapon or two around occasionally?

What if people simply do not enjoy Meta builds, but have fun with inferior builds?Why shouldn't these people at least be able to enjoy Open World?No one said meta.I said decent. There are a lot of people with unviable builds that get by simply from the carry in large groups.I do not feel these players should be catered to in the least. I believe the content should encourage them to get better.

For example, the build I currently enjoy most is Fire/air/Tempest ele with daggers.This isn't even close to being meta.If Arenanet pushes Open PvE so far that people can't play the builds they enjoy, do you think they stay in the game and use builds that are no fun to them?

This is why we can't have nice things.You already have high tier fractals and raids.Soon, you will have Strike Missions.You already have several "main story" bosses that can floor sub-optimal builds, including Balthazar and Mordremoth.

And you want to raise open world difficulty?I absolutely do.It will be much healthier for the game in the long run.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@mindcircus.1506 said:It will be much healthier for the game in the long run

Why don't you just play FF14 endgame or become a mystic raider in WoW if GW2 is too easy for you?Ruining the only content designed for casuals (the vast majority) just so a very small minority finds challenge everywhere isn't going to work out.Casuals aren't magically turning into elitist level players. They are going to find new games.I don't think kicking out the majority of the player base is healthy for any game.If they were to implement a hard mode for Open World, like they did in GW2, THAT would be a different story.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...